All About Risk

One of the original proponents of the Agile Manifesto, Kent Beck, begins his book Extreme Programming by stating:

"It's all about risk" - Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

This is a promising start. From there, he introduces his methodology, Extreme Programming, and explains how you can adopt it in your team, the features to observe and the characteristics of success and failure. However, while Risk has clearly driven the conception of Extreme Programming, there is no clear model of software risk underpinning the work, and the relationship between the practices he espouses and the risks he is avoiding are hidden.

In this book, we are going to introduce a model of software project risk. This means that in Book Two (Risk-First: Tools and Practices), we can properly analyse Extreme Programming (and Scrum, Waterfall, Lean and all the others) and understand what drives them. Since they are designed to deliver successful software projects, they must be about mitigate risks, and we will uncover exactly which risks are mitigated and how they do it.